Detroit Hockey Now’s Kevin Allen, writing a column for Hockeybuzz.com, focuses on seven contract negotiations which bear watching this upcoming season, and two of which have earned so much digital ink over the past couple of days in the Red Wings blogosphere that you’d think that one of the players has already been traded:
Detroit Red Wings/Dylan Larkin: This is a hometown hero. He grew up rooting for the Red Wings. He is the team’s captain. Larkin is popular with teammates. This was supposed to be an easy signing, even though he can be an unrestricted free agent next summer. But it’s September and there’s no deal.
Detroit Red Wings/Tyler Bertuzzi: The expectation was these negotiations were going to be bumpy. The Red Wings appreciate Bertuzzi as a player, but haven’t appreciated negotiating contracts with him. GM Steve Yzerman doesn’t discuss negotiations in public. But you could sense some tension going into this one. If they can’t get Bertuzzi signed, would they consider trading him? That seems like a possibility.
Continued; put bluntly, we don’t know what is going to happen with a Larkin and/or Bertuzzi extension until we see what happens.
Maybe I’m overreacting, but I’ve almost written a couple of, “Get a life” responses to several scribes who’ve all but spelled out the ways in which Tyler Bertuzzi is apparently going to leave town, and it’s just silly.
A lack of information from GM Steve Yzerman is of course going to lead to speculation as to whether Larkin or Bertuzzi will remain Red Wings, but that lack of information does not mean something good or something bad is going to happen. It means that we don’t know!
Historically, Bertuzzi did take the Wings to salary arbitration, and Larkin did not, and historically, Bertuzzi’s raised at least some mild dissatisfaction from the team regarding his vaccination status, but the past does not necessarily tell the future.
My best guess right now is that Larkin and Bertuzzi’s “ceilings” in terms of their “asks” have been spelled out in much more detail thanks to the J.T. Miller contract being signed recently (at an $8 million AAV), and I think that everybody needs to take a deep breath here, honestly.
If Larkin and Bertuzzi aren’t signed to contract extensions in December or January, yeah, it’s time to start worrying that one or both might not end the season as Red Wings. But it’s incredibly hard to believe that the Red Wings would trade their captain, and it’s also hard to imagine another team taking on Bertuzzi given his…complications…without knocking the value of the deal down a bit.
But for now, it’s time to take a deep breath or two, wonder whether the Wings will sign Larkin between now and the start of the regular season, and cross your fingers regarding Bertuzzi.
Right now, we just don’t know, and sometimes, even if you’re trying to read the tea leaves, the acceptance of not knowing is just part of the game.
